Imprisonment for Public Protection (Re-sentencing) Bill [HL]

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Yes, we would be facing the risk, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, pointed out, that we face every time a prisoner on a determinate sentence is released: they might reoffend or do something antisocial or disobliging. But that is life. What is not life is to imprison these people in a state of utter hopelessness. We do not run a gulag system; we run a justice system. I repeat my sympathy for the Ministers on the Front Bench, as this is not a problem of their making, but I regret to say that, as far as they are concerned, it is a problem they have to solve. We are here to help.

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I will add just a line or two to all the statements so far. I immensely commend the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, for having the guts and fearsomeness of argument, the persistence and, thank goodness, the irritation to keep going and pushing this as far as we reasonably and possibly can—and must.

We will hear, as we have already, essentially Second Reading re-runs, because we are all just fed up and angry. We know, as the Minister knows, that in his file sit rather wishy-washy arguments about public protection which just do not stack up. One of the reasons they do not is that any assessment of those still languishing in prison will show that, of the 1,000 plus on IPP sentences, looking at their original time of sentence, 80% of them were for non-violent offences. In which case, based on accurate judicial knowledge of those individuals, we cannot say that they pose a public risk. Because they have never been let out, we have no evidence to prove that they will behave otherwise. When they did go to courts for sentencing, they were not there for violent actions; in which case, let them out, for goodness’ sake.

Do not continue to use the argument that there is a public protection issue; that is nonsense. It is simply a very nice Civil Service and Secretary of State way to say that we do not want to deal with it, because it keeps the public smiling. Ministers know that what they are really doing is perpetuating a gross, unacceptable injustice and acts of torture that are destroying individuals’ lives and sending them to suicide and desecration, and which are a gross stain on what we call justice or anything to do with it. I beg Ministers to take those pages out, hand them back to civil servants and say, “Meet some real prisoners”.

I continue to receive information—three times in the last month—directly from prisoners who are on IPP sentences who have heard nothing of the provisions of last year’s legislation. This is even though all sorts of messages went out from the Ministry of Justice last year and this year to inform governors that they should make sure prisoners know about the changes in the regulations and legislation, and that reconsideration of their position is possible. They have heard nothing. Why? Some say that frankly, the system does not believe it is going to work. There is also too much bureaucracy in it.

When we look at the range of amendments before us, both the probing ones but also, if necessary, the voting ones, what we are really seeing is all of us finding ways to hedge around this untidy mess. It is an untidy mess because the simplicity of accepting that a wrong has been consistently done means that there is a more straightforward way for a right to be consistently done. Give dignity to the individuals involved, accepting, as in the group meeting the Minister mentioned, that there may well be a few hundred who are simply so mentally distressed that they cannot participate in the process, they have lost hope altogether, they feel there is no point to their reassessment and they almost want to hang back on it all. That is a tragedy; it is a loss of human dignity and a destruction of their souls.

For those few hundred, we need to find a different way to support their mental recovery, as one of the amendments does, but when it comes to the majority, we are begging the Minister not to swallow the argument that this is all about public protection. Those of us who work in prisons week in, week out, know very well that it is not.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I want to contribute to this debate as I did at Second Reading, not that I have the expertise on the justice system that other participants have. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, for championing the Bill. I agree, as the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, just said, that this is an injustice amounting to torture. The ball is being kicked down the road in a completely unacceptable fashion. There is a way out—there are several ways out, actually—and I will come later to the Howard League proposals that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, mentioned.

I principally think that insofar as there is risk, it may be no more than would be taken in the release of prisoners under a normal regime. It has, however, become a great concern of the Government that they could get blamed if people are released from IPP sentences and go on to commit other offences. Blame already attaches when other prisoners are released, but there is a particular fixation on this and I think we have to give the Government the courage, on a cross-party basis, to tackle this.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, talked about the guts of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who, having been the instigator of the original regime, has had the guts to admit that it was the wrong thing to do. We had the report from the Justice Select Committee in the other place, which was cross party. The former Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk repeated the conclusion of our late colleague and former Supreme Court justice Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood about the IPP system being a stain on our justice system. In one of her first speeches in the other place last July, during a debate about IPP, the present Lord Chancellor said,

“The situation with IPP prisoners is of great concern … We want to make progress with that cohort of prisoners”.”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/24; col. 180.]


Well, that was already almost a year ago.

Concern has been expressed across the political spectrum; the Government should take that into account and be ready to grasp the nettle. It has taken decades for there to be recognition of injustice in other sectors. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, talked about the Post Office Horizon scandal, and we had the infected blood scandal and several others. In this country, we seem to be very bad at righting wrongs with dispatch.

In the words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, I would like to give the IPP system a huge whack, because it is a scandal and an outrage. I refer to the report that was published a couple of weeks ago by the Howard League for Penal Reform. The league had an expert committee—very expert, not least because it was chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas. In his foreword to the report, he said:

“History shows that governments invariably find it difficult to remedy state wrongs; this is even more so when those subject to the injustice have broken the law. Successive governments have now recognised that the IPP sentence was a mistake. It is long overdue for those whose lives continue to be blighted by this sentence to be released from its clutches”.


There are six recommendations in the report. I hope and believe that the Minister has read it. I am glad to see that he is nodding. On these Benches and others, we place great hopes in the sense and experience of the Minister in this area.

The Bill is about resentencing. The amendments tabled today are modifications to the original proposals, but the Howard League is proposing another way. I do not want to detract from resentencing. We all wanted to see resentencing, but for reasons which passeth all understanding, this Government are apparently no more willing—unless the Minister is going to surprise us out of our skins—to accept resentencing. I hope that he can give us some encouragement that he is willing to look at another scheme, such as that put forward by the Howard League, which is to have what it calls a two-year conditional release. This would modify the current approach of the Parole Board, which requires the board to decide whether it is necessary for the protection of the public for the individual to be detained.

The proposal in the report is that in IPP cases, the Parole Board should be asked to set a date for when the person will be released, within a two-year window, and what is required to achieve that safely. This would give the certainty of a release date, alleviating the significant mental distress of those serving the sentence, increase the likelihood of re-engagement for those who have lost confidence in the system, for reasons we can all understand, and facilitate the safe and speedy release of those who are stuck in prison on IPP sentences. There are other suggestions in the report which I do not wish to take up time talking about, but the main one is a reform to the recall system, the operation of which is very bad.

I do hope that if the Minister cannot help us on resentencing today, he can give us a chink of light to end this scandalous, outrageous injustice and is willing to say that within a short time the Government will seize this issue and give hope to people, their families and friends, and all of us who hate to see this injustice and the hopelessness that goes with it. I am preaching to the converted with these sentiments, I believe: what we need now is a practical scheme to get out of this terrible situation.